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There’s a common narrative about the national debt that is repeated over and over in the media. It goes like this:

Over the last 50 years, the national debt has increased dramatically. This is a very bad thing, because the government will need to repay this debt someday. We are passing on a huge burden to our children and grandchildren, who will have to live with greatly restricted government spending while we pay down our $21 trillion national debt. We need to start cutting public spending and raising taxes now before something very bad happens. We wouldn’t want the United States to become the next Greece, now would we?

Elected officials and pundits across the mainstream political spectrum buy into this narrative to one degree or another. It’s a very powerful tool in the hands of the Right, because they can use it to argue for massive cuts to…

The liberal wing of the Supreme Court, notably including swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, today made same-sex marriage legal in every state of the Union. Millions, gay and straight, rejoiced.

Writing the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy acknowledged that the Constitution says nothing about gay people, let alone gay marriage, because when it was written there was no visible gay population. Same-sex marriage was not an issue. Justice Kennedy explains:

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and…

Dustin Hoffman is profoundly moved as he remembers and tells what he learned when he played the lead role in “Tootsie.” The video, recently surfaced and now gone viral, reveals how little men understood what it meant to be a woman 30 years ago. Playing a woman was of course challenging to Hoffman as an actor, but the experience also challenged his assumptions and attitudes that he had never questioned.

Playing Dorothy Michaels, Hoffman had an epiphany when he realized that his character wasn’t beautiful, and there was nothing he and his makeup artists could do about it. He would never have given Dorothy, his character, a second look, because he would have judged her exclusively by her looks. Hoffman is moved to tears when he thinks of how many fascinating women he never met or learned from or laughed with, because he was “brainwashed.” Watch the video after the…

Now that Bradley Manning has admitted to giving classified documents to WikiLeaks, the government insists his crimes are tantamount to support for al-Qaida and international terrorism. These leaks, I would like to suggest, are analogous to somebody violating a jaywalking law in an attempt to save a pedestrian from on oncoming Mac truck. Joining me today by phone from New York to discuss the wide area in between those two extremes is Alexa O’Brien. Alexa is a journalist, researcher, and social activist. She is a co-plaintiff, along with Christopher Hedges in the NDAA suit against the Obama administration trying to overturn the National Defense Authorization act, which states that US citizens can be indefinitely detained without charge or trial. She is currently investigating the Bradley Manning trial and the US government’s pursuit of WikiLeaks. And if you have read the 10,00 word plus transcript of Bradley Manning’s statement to the…